Daily Archives: February 24, 2016

In continuing with part 2 of this series, I’m going to discuss zoning requirements for SANcopy on the XtremIO. To recap before we begin, I have a VMware environment that I am migrating from VNX to XtremIO. Most of this environment can be migrated via storage vMotion to the XtremIO. However, there are quite a few of VMs that have physical mode RDMs that need to be migrated via SANcopy. We chose SANcopy over Open Migrator because these following reasons:

SANcopy enabler is installed on the source VNX

SANcopy will require one outage to shutdown the server on time of cutover

SANcopy is array-based and would not impact the host CPU

Open Migrator is only supported for Microsoft Windows Server

Open Migrator requires three reboots to migrate (one to attach filter driver to source and target drives, two to actually cutover one drives are in sync, and three to uninstall the software)

First things first; we need to zone our target XtremIO to the source VNX. With following EMC Best Practices, we will create 1-to-1 zones on each Fabric for SP A and SP B ports to two controllers.

Fabric A

Zones

Source VNX

Target XtremIO

Zone 1

SP A-port 5

X1-SC1-FC1

Zone 2

SP A-port 5

X1-SC2-FC1

Zone 3

SP B-port 5

X1-SC1-FC1

Zone 4

SP B-port 5

X1-SC2-FC1

* SP A-port 5 and SP B-port 5 are connected to Fabric A in my environment*

Yes… yes… I know I used the acronym XIO (XIO is not XtremIO) for my fcalias and zone names. Sorry! 🙂

You can choose to split this across multiple bricks if you have more than one brick in your XtremIO cluster. Even though, you really only need to zone one storage controller at a minimum, we are choosing to zone two controllers and will split the SANcopy sessions across the two controllers to balance out the load.

Once we have our zoning in place, we should now see the VNX visible from the XtremIO. You can view this in the CLI by issuing the show-discovered-initiators-connectivity command or in the GUI by creating a new initiator group for the VNX and selecting the drop down to show the SP A and SP B WWPNs. Create a new initiator group on the XtremIO for the VNX and map the target volumes for the SANcopy session to this initiator group. Take note of the HLU you assigned to the volume mapping and also the target FC ports on the XtremIO you zoned to the VNX.

The next part of this guide will discuss what is needed on the VNX source before SANcopy sessions can be created. We are going to talk about reserved LUN pool, requirements around that, and creating the SANcopy session itself. Stay tuned!